Sadler’s Wells; Paul Hamlyn Hall, Royal Opera House, London
Athletes and dancers meet each other halfway in Rachid Ouramdane’s latest. And Pam Tanowitz taps into Covent Garden’s past while reaching out to the future

It’s a rule of life that dancers can do anything with their bodies. In Rachid Ouramdane’s new work, Outsider , made with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, they slide across the stage like oil, tumbling and curling like acrobats, swinging one another around like supple dolls. One woman falls and rises like a pendulum across a mass of bodies that gently push her from side to side.

The stage, in Sylvain Giraudeau’s stark design, is crisscrossed with a cat’s cradle of taut climbing wires held on gantries. French-Algerian choreographer Ouramdane’s stroke of magic is to introduce four extreme sport athletes who hang aloft seamlessly in semi-silhouette, their weightlessness contrasting with the gravity-bound dancers beneath. When they walk the tightrope, their arms wobble gently as they seek balance.

Equity union says filming scenes at home amounts to unpaid labour and reinforces elitism

Actors seeking their next role are now routinely asked to “self-tape” their auditions, a practice that amounts to unpaid labour and reinforces elitism in the creative industries, the union Equity has warned.

Before the Covid lockdowns, self-tapes were a fallback for anyone unable to make an in-person casting – for example if they were working abroad. But during the pandemic they became the norm and have remained so ever since.

The beautiful and hardy herds of the Welsh valleys act as a counterpoint to three decades of change in photographer Ken Grant’s images

Ken Grant’s Cwm: A Fair Country , a collection of nearly 30 years of landscape photography in the South Walian valleys, begins with a moving prologue. It mentions a painting he’s known since his Liverpudlian childhood, still sitting above his 92-year-old father’s mantelpiece: “Dapple-bruised Welsh horses, painted in a loose herd, are imagined beneath a sky that promises rain.”

From 1998, on commutes from Liverpool to the University of Wales, Newport (where he led a documentary photography degree), he noticed similar horses – completely by coincidence. “I didn’t seek them out at first, but on my drives, I soon got aware that they were there. Sometimes up a valley’s road, you’d see packs of 40 or 50.”

The former Vanity Fair editor on how #MeToo changed Hollywood, what Christopher Hitchens would make of the US today, and the value of a handkerchief

Graydon Carter, 75, is a Canadian-born journalist. He co-created the satirical magazine Spy , edited the New York Observer , and from 1992 until 2017 was the editor of Vanity Fair . In 2019 he founded Air Mail, an online newsletter for “worldly cosmopolitans”. His memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines , has just been published. He lives in New York with his third wife, not far from the Waverly Inn, the restaurant he co-owns, and has five children. Donald Trump has called him a “dummy” and “a real loser” who has “no talent and looks like shit”.

Before we talk magazines, as a Canadian-born non-fan of Trump, how’s the view over there?
Well, I think very highly of Mark Carney [the new Canadian prime minister]. He’s not going to take any grief. But the sad thing is that in two months, Trump has made [the US] the enemy of the world. If there was another 9/11 this week, I don’t think the world would rush to support us in the same way.

Sean Bean plays a scouse drug lord in a superior gangland drama. Elsewhere, a poignant portrait of Covid’s aftermath, Seth Rogen’s Hollywood satire, and the return of Bridget Christie’s out-there menopause comedy

This City Is Ours (BBC One) | iPlayer
Love and Loss: The Pandemic 5 Years On (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Studio ( Apple TV+ )
The Change (Channel 4) | channel4.com

Oh great, I thought, when I first heard about This City Is Ours (BBC One), a gangland drama – we definitely haven’t got enough of those. But, oh me of little faith! Written by Stephen Butchard ( The Last Kingdom ) across eight episodes, set in Liverpool and laced with pathos, greed and everyday brutality, this turns out to be a different level of gangland drama.

From The Apprentice to 13th, our critic selects titles that shed light on the US under Trump. Alex Gibney, whose new documentary examines how ‘dark money’ became part of the American system, introduces the list

This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution – it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.

It reminds me of that moment in Once Upon a Time in the West , when Henry Fonda sits behind the rail tycoon’s desk and says: “It’s almost like holding a gun, only much more powerful.” The US has always been about money. That’s been our blessing and our curse. It’s the land of great opportunity, but that obsession with money over everything else has now taken us to a very bad place. We’ve reached the dark side of the American dream.

Stills, Edinburgh; Photographers’ Gallery, London
From loneliness in Norfolk to vibrant Indian culture in Leicester, a touring show captures a riot of contradictions. Elsewhere, Leeds is lent an otherworldly air by a colour photography pioneer

Given that we live in a time defined by the rise of far-right populism and a widespread indifference to traditional party politics, the idea of a unified “working class” seems almost romantic, a throwback to an age when Labour was synonymous with socialism rather than centrism. In this context, the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition After the End of History is a defiant statement, though it’s less a celebration of shared values and traditions than a series of revealing glimpses of what curator Johny Pitts describes as the “complex and counterintuitive expressions of working-class life”.

The show’s high-flown title refers to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s controversial assertion that history of a kind ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy. Much of the work on the walls is too personal and too local to be read in this context, but it does reflect Pitts’s stated aim to create an exhibition “full of contradictions, like working-class life is”.

A new set of Royal Mail stamps on regional folklore reminds us of our deep roots to the land

It is possible to have too much trust in a marriage. The mythic Welsh warrior Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who appears to have been bigger on brawn than brain, once came home to find his wife, the flower-maiden Blodeuwedd, weeping with fear over premonitions of his death. She begged Lleu to prove that he was, as rumoured, invincible.

Lleu, who had clearly not read the story of Delilah, thought it was a good idea to reveal to his wife each of the unlikely and incongruous conditions that would make it possible for a rival to kill him: among other kinks, they required him to be caught outdoors on a riverbank with one foot straddling a thatched cauldron and one on a wriggling goat. Lo and behold, in one year’s time Lleu found himself being struck down in exactly that pose by Blodeuwedd and her lover, the hunter Gronw Pebr. The story is still told to explain the peculiar shape of the Stone of Gronw, sitting to this day on the banks of the River Cynfal in Blaenau Ffestiniog.

The long and often shocking journey to finding the alleged killer of young women in Long Island is brought to a wider audience in a damning new Netflix series

The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer . Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls , an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help.

It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called “Gilgo Four” – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan’s home.